Chapter Eleven
Rayne
Caiden walks through the doorway as I’m crouched beside a rambling Maddie, her mouth filled with a sucker I should have known better than to give her, because my mind has been swimming with filthy thoughts I have no business thinking since I handed it to her.
“What’s the verdict? Are we gaining a gnarly scar or what?” he asks as soon as the door shuts behind him, his crossed arms leaning across the back of the couch as he peers down at Maddie, interrupting her stutterless rant about Transformers.
I catch Maddie’s gaze as she looks at me questioningly, and I shrug with a nonchalance I hope keeps her calm. “Maybe a small one, but nothing too dramatic. Her eyebrow should cover most of it.”
I’ve never seen a woman pout around a sucker before, but it doesn’t help the situation in my head or my boxers, so I choose to ignore it and focus on my task at hand instead, just as she grumbles, “All that pain just to get a minor mark instead of the badass scar I was expecting. Today is full of disappointments. Next, you’ll tell me I won’t get the bloodstains out of my white shirt. ”
Bax, Caid, and I all share a look, one that doesn’t go missed, and the little drama queen actually whimpers and sighs. “My life is in the pits today. I demand a restart. A restart, I say!”
Snickering, Bax takes a seat on the arm of the chair that doesn’t contain Maddie’s legs and soothes, “There’s always tomorrow, right?”
“I have to get through the rest of this shit-sucking day to get to tomorrow. What if things get worse, hm? What if my car actually does get crushed by robots in disguise?” the injured woman before me argues, and I already know she’s about to fall right into another tangent.
I’ve already listened to her adorable rambles while I cleaned the blood from her head, revealing just how deep the cut really is.
Definitely a stitches job. Maddie is lucky I’m experienced in fixing people, otherwise I’d be marching her straight to the hospital regardless of her protests.
“Or what if the Avengers crash through the city, destroying my building in the name of saving the city? What even is that about, anyway? They’re trying to save the city by destroying it.
Have you ever seen them fixing what they broke afterward?
I certainly haven’t. Imagine the Hulk cleaning alien debris from the middle of the street.
Or Iron Man and Captain America calling the owners of the cars they’ve crushed along the way.
What if you’ve just paid off your car and an alien hover-glider falls onto it?
That would be a worse day than what I’m having. ”
Stunned silence follows, and her pretty blue eyes pop open with confusion. She looks at us all, her unsure gaze gliding over each of us, before she removes the sucker from her reddened lips and blurts, “What? They’re valid concerns.”
“No, they’re not. They’re just as valid as the Autobots or Decepticons landing on Earth,” Baxter argues, sounding like he’s already had this particular debate, and my lips twitch knowing that it’s very likely.
If there’s anything I’m learning about this chaos-filled little pixie, it’s that she’s nothing short of surprising.
“You don’t know that. And, you know what, if your car ever gets steamrolled by a crazed sentient robot looking for special Witwicky glasses, then I reserve the right to say I told you so,” Maddie declares, giving Baxter a funny little smile before disregarding him when he laughs.
The pink hue to her cheeks doesn’t go unnoticed, though, and new thoughts enter my mind that would better suit the ones Caiden was having during the house meeting I was kidnapped to.
Such as, are we crushing on her? What are we going to do about it?
Rock, paper, scissors? Or, what was it Caiden said? Group plans?
My black latex-glove-covered hands pause mid-cleaning, and I feel Maddie’s eyes on me more than I see them as I actually put some thought into that particular suggestion.
I have no idea how serious Caiden was when he suggested it, but the idea sticks in my head.
I start to wonder if I could actually make that happen.
Whether or not I could share Maddie if I were to pursue anything with her.
That thought alone has me staring at the woman in shock, her own gaze growing concerned as she watches me closely. When the hell did I even decide I would pursue her to begin with?
Shaking my head free of thoughts I shouldn’t be having right now, I clear my throat and continue cleaning around the slice in Madison’s head until I can see exactly where the hockey stick split her skin. Oh, yeah, that’s definitely one that needs stitches.
“How high is your pain tolerance?” I ask Mads, hoping it’s high enough to let me get these stitches done without having to take her to the hospital. Speaking of which… “Why aren’t you heading to the hospital to get this fixed, anyway?”
After a very long-suffering sigh that almost has me smiling, she finally says, “My ex works at the hospital.”
That famous, fuzzy blue hedgehog couldn’t run faster than how quickly my nearly-there smile disappears, a sudden surge of anger swelling up in my chest that it takes everything within me to keep my hands steady, face neutral, and eyes clear enough to continue working on Maddie’s cut.
The anger that flares up inside me is totally unnatural, especially since I’ve known the woman for all of one morning.
I have absolutely no business getting angry.
I can only blame it on the unusual bonding moment we had when I was forced to scoop her naked, lube-covered body out of her bathtub.
“I’d honestly prefer to suffer through the polar bear invasion again than see that small-dicked panty-sniffer,” Maddie grumbles, her free hand subconsciously reaching for the cut on her head again, sucker clutched in her hand as she talks.
Without putting much thought into it and ignoring the sudden burst of possessiveness I feel toward the manic little pixie, I reach for her hand and tuck it under my arm.
It doesn’t go unnoticed how her hand immediately clenches into my shirt, her small fist pressing into my back as she continues talking.
“That guy is a stage-five clinger. I’m talking slime-in-your-hair kind of clinger, not the good kind.
The kind of slime you have to cut out, or quite possibly shave your entire head, to remove.
I like my hair. I don’t want to be bald,” she whines, and I accidentally snort, drawing out a pitiful glare that is perfectly aimed at my chin.
Thankfully, Caiden distracts her enough to lure her attention away. “I think you’d still look hella pretty with a bald head, Blue. No worries there.”
She would, too. I don’t think there’s much that would make her look horrible, not even a small scar through her eyebrow.
“That doesn’t make me feel better, if you can believe it,” she counters, popping the sucker back in her mouth and sighing like she’s suffered some serious trials and tribulations today.
To be fair to her, she’s truly gone through a war of her own this morning, so I can’t fault her dramatics.
“Anyway, I’m steering clear of the hospital until he either spontaneously combusts, is fired for mysterious reasons, or gets hit by a pretty matte-black Jeep with blue dice that hang on the rearview mirror. ”
“Why do I have a feeling you’ll be the cause of all of those scenarios?” Baxter snickers, a knowing lilt to his voice that forces me to look at Maddie’s expression.
I catch the moment a diabolical smile pulls at Maddie’s lips, an almost scary little gleam in her eye that promises retribution, vengeance, and justice, right before she spookily wonders, “Whatever do you mean?”
“Oh my God,” Caiden breathes, right before he walks away laughing, and Bax has to smother his laugh with a swipe of his hand over his face.
Me? I’m forced to close my eyes for a long moment, trying to compose myself so I don’t enable the psycho in front of me, sure that if too many of us laugh at the possibility of her committing murder, she’ll actually go through with it.
After finding some sense of control, I calmly ask, “What’s the reason you’re plotting the guy’s downfall? Or is it just because his pecker was small?”
“Oh, there’s no plotting to be had. We’re already in the stages of destruction.
After I caught him cheating on me with some woman he worked with in my house, because Toby would never dare use a cent of his money to buy or pay for anything, I sold my house without giving him any warning.
I also had a bonfire made of all his clothes, made a meme of his little peen, and had a very lengthy conversation with his mother about what a scumbag she raised.
She wasn’t too pleased to hear that her golden child had used me for my money and connections, but I think what pissed her off most was hearing how her son could only last in the bedroom for four minutes, if we’re being generous, and decided to stick that unimpressive appendage into anything that breathes.
Revenge is something I am well-versed in,” Maddie both explains and divulges, and I can only sit there, stunned for a long moment as I absorb every word.
I’m torn between being scared and impressed, leaning toward the latter since I’m not on the receiving end of such a diabolical revenge plan.
Clearing my throat, I sit back on the heels of my feet and ask, “Are you the devil?”
At that, the blue-haired menace laughs loudly, and I’ll be damned if that isn’t the best sound I’ve heard in a very long time. It somehow warms my insides and makes my heart stutter, the sound like music to my ears.